DISASTER MOVIES

Role and Development of Sound Design in Disaster Movies

Role and Development of Sound Design in Disaster Movies

Introduction

Disaster stories existed long before science fiction was a recognized genre; indeed, the biblical account of Noah's Flood predates the novel altogether. Even Leonardo da Vinci felt inspired to narrate a fictional destruction of the world in Deluge. Novelists such as H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, and S. Fowler Wright produced classic tales of the devastation of large portions of the world and the near extinction of the human race, and in the 1950s the disaster movies become almost a subgenre of its own in English movies (Cherrier, 2011).

Expressive Stylization of film using sound design requires exploration of the relationship of image and sound as well as the uses of sound as narrative suture, cutting principle, as with every formal element, conveyor of subjectivity (Brewster et al., 2010). Expanding sound's apparatus in film deepened the viewer's experience, now as likely to hear a movie as see one. Sound-image disconnect was prevalent. Avoiding pleonasm disconnect could deepen meaning with metaphors or enliven the proceedings with cool irony, satire, put-down, or put-on (Alten, 2010).

A disconnect could also immerse film viewer into a state of soul, as with Point Blank's endless sight/sound splits mirroring the disembodied protagonist (Woodhall, 2010). A distinct type of disconnect, off-screen sound, in addition to energizing screen space, sharpened conflict as an unseen group spews accusations in the protagonist's face, concocted suspense in director's hands.

Disaster Movie

Most disaster movies are bloated caricatures of Night of the Living Dead, floundering in their titanic budgets. The early 1970s cycle - The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Airport (1970), Earth Quake (1974), The Towering Inferno (1974), 2012 (2012) — was the major studios' attempt to reclaim the apocalypse, a subject which had in the decade since On the Beach (1959) become the exclusive property of the intellectually vital, critically disreputable, minority audience exploitation film (Grimshaw, 2010). The problem with disaster movies, and the reason the form quickly produced a series grotesquely unprofitable bombs like The Swarm, Meteor (1979), Beyond the Poseid4, Adventure (1979), When Time Ran Our (1980) and Raise the Titanic (1980), is that they are conceived more as saleable product than as cinema (Cherrier, 2011).

Disaster movie shows the catastrophe to viewers. It represents a specific kind of thrillers movie and dramas where the main characters fall into the accident and try to escape from the situation. Usually, these films show a picture crashes to natural disasters, such as an earthquake, tornado, volcanic eruption, a plane crash accident, etc (Alten, 2010). The Day after Tomorrow features aspects of the “plague” or disaster movies in his study on various cycles of disaster films. Stephen Keane argues:

“Where disaster is an ever-present threat it invariably leads to a race against time”. (Cherrier, 2011, 118)

The tropes of the Hollywood disaster movie are variously employed in World Trade Centre to enable a traumatic event to be represented with some notion of resolution—even if scriptwriter Andrea Berkoff has created a narrative that moves away from the event of disaster and instead ...